Haiti's garment sweatshops in general

This Week in Haiti,Haiti Progres,
3–9 January 1996. Workers stitching clothing
emblazoned with feel-good Disney characters are not even
paid enough to feed themselves, let alone their families,
charges the New York-based National Labor Committee
Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in
Central America (NLC).

By Julia Lutsky, People's Weekly World,
23 March 1996. Haitian sweatshops pay starvation
wages. Blatant abuses of labor and illegal practices are
blatant. US manufacturers look for third world countries
where high unemployment, poverty, and malnutrition generate
low wages. The US has pressed businesses to invest in Haiti
and has given them tax breaks. USAID pressure kept the legal
minimum wage at $2.40 per day.

This Week in Haiti,Haiti Progres, 1–7
May 1996. Seamfast Manufacturing, which sews for K-mart and
J.C. Penny, has been paying some workers one-third minimum
wage, about 10 gourdes for eight hours (64 U.S. cents/day or
8 cents/hour).

By Daniel Vila, People's Weekly World,
21 December 1996. Abusive conditions prevalent in the
factories where The Disney Company gets its clothing
manufactured. Protest by the National Labor Committee, a
non-profit human rights advocacy group which has exposed the
link between U.S. multinationals and sweatshops around the
world.

By Charles Arthur, 10 July 1997. A representative of Batay
Ouvriye (Workers' Struggle), a Haitian workers'
organisation, has completed a two week trip to Europe to make
contact with garment workers' unions and campaigning
groups as part of the international campaign to pressure the
Walt Disney Company.

Action Alert, Campaign for Labor Rights, 8 August
1998. USAID, in charge of providing economic support to
Haiti, states, that it has no position on the violations of
the Haitian minimum wage law, and for years it actively
pressured President Aristide not to increase the minimum
wage. The relation of US foreign policy and US corporations
in Haiti.

Issued by the Haiti Support Group on 25 November
2003. Garment assembly production is well-underway at the
first factory to open in the new free trade zone near
Ouanaminthe on the Haitian side of the border with the
Dominican Republic. In October the Grupo M-run plant was
producing about 8,000 pairs of black Levi's 505 and
550 jeans each week, with about 260 employees. Media reports
of low pay and arbitrary dismissal in the Grupo M
factory.